I’m starting a blog. What better time than now? A time where AI can churn out ungodly reams of optimistic lies, commit subtly broken code, and forge deep fakes faster than you can say phishing. It’s a time of great fear and excitement for what could be. A time where it all hangs on the balance of a knife’s edge.
I became a software engineer because I love tinkering with machines. They can make dreams come true, invent unimaginable sounds and pictures, and solve equations faster than any person ever could. But now the machines have learned our language, can speak it and follow our commands directly. Now is an exciting time.
What will the software industry become? Instead of obsessing over our functions and JSX trees, we can now tell the LLM which startup’s landing page we wish to copy and poof, we have it in seconds.
Decades ago software engineers were faced with a similar dilemma. “How could a compiler generate assembly code as good as mine?!” they shouted. Their pride laid in those hand crafted machine instructions, and rightly so, since compilers were slow and an expert could often produce better machine code. LLMs today are like those early compilers, but crazier. They’re raising the abstraction level, and adding a handful of unpredictability. It’s undefined behavior on steroids.
These new tools are incredibly fascinating, and they’ve lured me back into studying the world of AI. Maybe I’m a sellout of humanity, but I have a strong desire to help build this new AI future. To build an Agent that can take my commands, and can toil away at whatever aspect of the code that I find boring at the moment, so I can focus on the good stuff (whatever that may be). You could say I’m giving myself a promotion, by building my own monster so it can do the heavy lifting.
Of course I’m hopeful that this isn’t just blind enthusiasm that is driving humanity towards it’s own demise. What happens if we succeed? We really don’t know! Either way it’s exciting. Let’s hope that I can make something of the opportunity. Let’s hope I don’t get radicalized by the extensive trips to X required to keep up with the AI inteligentista. Let’s hope it all doesn’t end before (or after) we hear our agents say, “Hello World”.